Amazon rainforest with fog in the morning near Alta Floresta, Mato Grosso, Brazil

© Pulsar Imagens/Alam

A misty morning in Brazil

The Amazon rainforest is big. Almost unimaginably big. To begin to grasp its immensity, consider these numbers: The Amazon rainforest covers about two percent of the world's surface area, nearly 5.5 million square kilometres across South America, mostly (nearly 60 percent) in the country you see here, Brazil. It's an area that accounts for over half of the Earth's remaining rainforests. The breadth of biodiversity is incomparable–nearly 16,000 different tree species, 40,000 species of other plants, 2.5 million insect species, and over 2,000 different types of birds and mammals. Incredibly, perhaps a tenth of the planet's known species call the Amazon home, many of which have not even been identified.